Only three months ago, I entered my internship at the Centre for Sport Capacity (CSC) as the Marketing, Communications and Event Intern. How fast time has flown, as I near the end of my internship. I can now look back at my four months at the Centre and see how much I have grown both as a person and a professional. 

To begin, I would first like to thank Dr. Julie Stevens, Director of the CSC, and Grace Nelson, Coordinator at the CSC for granting me this internship opportunity. From the beginning, Dr. Stevens and Grace asked me what I wanted to get out of my placement so that they could tailor the internship to my interests and goals. From then on, I knew the CSC was the place I wanted to intern. The team’s openness and enthusiasm for my interests would ensure that this internship would both meet and exceed my expectations and anticipated outcomes, which it did. 

During my time at the CSC, I was constantly given opportunities to not only develop new skills, but also to strengthen my pre-existing skills through various tasks. Being a visual and hands-on learner, I was encouraged to dive right in and experiment with my creativity on Canva when making content. This allowed me to gain experience in independent work while also experimenting with new ideas for different designs and styles on social media, and website layouts. Grace encouraged me to let my creative mind flow which made me feel that my creativity was encouraged and not being stifled.  Additionally, this encouragement to work artistically allowed me to create some of my most original content to date. As part of my daily tasks, I was able to showcase my content through the CSC’s X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts, for which I posted over 70 pieces of content combined and created over 100 pieces total. One of the designs I am most proud of is my Women’s History Month Post highlighting Dr. Stevens’ co-authored book titled “Too Many Men On The Ice: Women’s Hockey in North America.” 

My most memorable experience at the CSC was having the opportunity to attend, plan, manage, and host various events. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Grand Slam of Curling in Niagara to conduct an event impact analysis. At this event, I was tasked with asking spectators, vendors, and volunteers to complete an event impact analysis survey, to determine what impact this event had on the Niagara region. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet employees at Sportsnet who gave my colleagues and me a behind-the-scenes tour of the Grand Slam, and we got to learn about the broadcasting and management of a large-scale event.  

Further, during my four months at the CSC we hosted; a Safe Sport Hybrid Forum titled “Can Sport Regulate Itself?”, a Book Launch and Author Reading, and lastly a Club Development Workshop on emotional labour in coaching. I was very fortunate to experience being the lead event planner and manager for 3 of these 4 events, for which I gained many valuable skills such as leadership, working collaboratively with others, and communications. These skills can be applied to my future career as I will always be working with others to collaborate on various projects, tasks, and/or events. 

Moreover, the CSC allowed me to develop and strengthen my skills in communications, decision-making, social media proficiency, and competency in digital softwares. Developing these skills were learning objectives I set out for myself at the beginning of the internship. I gained experience in communications through writing emails and social media captions. This along with Grace’s comments about tone, consistency and cohesion, audience, and message, has allowed me to become a much more competent and stronger writer. Regarding decision-making, this is something I found quite challenging at the beginning of my internship as I was new to the CSC and was not yet familiar with their brand. I now feel I am much more confident in making decisions regarding administrative communications, social media designs, event planning and execution.  

Moving into social media proficiency, while I had experience with Instagram prior to my placement, LinkedIn and X were new to me. Having the opportunity to use and interact with these platforms daily has allowed me to become much more proficient with social media. Lastly, prior to my time at the CSC, my competency in digital softwares was an area I was eager to expand my skills in. At the CSC, we use softwares such as Canva, Google Analytics, and WordPress among others. These softwares were new to me and I can now say I am much more competent in using these platforms to create designs for social media, to collect analytics, and to design websites. 

Overall, my internship placement at the CSC has both met and exceeded my expectations. The skills and knowledge I gained were crucial to my personal and professional development. I am forever grateful for the opportunities the CSC provided me and would highly recommend an internship at the CSC to any fourth year Sport Management Student. I look forward to a future career in the sports world using what I have learned during my time at the CSC.